HITLAB Team • February 8, 2024
This week’s edition of “In The Spotlight” features Breakthrough One (BT1) Global Fellow, Dr. David Berger.
Dr. Berger is CEO of SUNY Downstate Medical Center. He is a physician leader with demonstrated results in hospital operations including ICUs, operating rooms, acute care wards, and outpatient clinics. Dr, Berger also has experience with lean management and working with systems engineers to improve processes. By training, he is a surgical oncologist and general surgeon. He also has his master’s degree in health care management from Harvard University.
Dr. Berger is recognized as a national leader in healthcare quality and patient safety. He is also a strategic leader, capable of building, coaching, and mentoring diverse teams to drive healthcare transformation and organizational growth. He is also a digital health expert, whose had success working with startups to implement early-stage digital health solutions,
We recently had the opportunity to interview Dr. Berger about the current and future state of digital health. Below are some excerpts from our conversation.
Q: Tell us a little bit about yourself…
A. I started out on a path to be an academic surgeon, a Division, Chief, Dean chair etc…, but as the person in my family who takes care of my parents as well as my kids, I quickly learned how confusing and difficult it was to navigate the healthcare system. I felt that I can do more by being a healthcare administrator than by just being a surgeon. My goal is administrator has really been to make health care simple for everyone.
I am married to my wife, Adrian for 40 years. We have four children: Stephanie, Rachel, Daniela, and Isaac and my favorite thing to do is ski. I love to read historical fiction, and in the summer I like to spend time at the beach.
Q:What do you see as some of the biggest challenges facing healthcare industry?
A. As someone who runs a hospital, I see things from the provider viewpoint. Coming out of the pandemic, the things that initially we were challenged with were recapturing volume and dealing with the economic fallout. Now, I think the number one issue we are faced with are issues with the workforce.
We’ve had significant inflation over the last several years, which has driven up the cost of healthcare workers. Additionally, there is a shortage across the board of healthcare providers, This includes physicians, nurses and technicians, which makes it really difficult, especially as the population ages and the demands on the healthcare system increase. We do not have enough people to provide the care that’s necessary.
I always look at challenges as opportunities, it is why I’m so active in digital health, I think digital health tools and solutions as well as artificial intelligence provide opportunities for us to make sure that our healthcare workers can focus on providing patient care instead of being bogged down by busy work.
Q: What are the opportunities?
A. Most providers spend at least 50% of their time sitting at a computer manually entering information. Now, digital tools can free-up providers to do what they trained to do.
As a provider, I see four different buckets: in which digital tools can help improve 1) Back office tasks such as revenue cycles, 2) Front office things such as scheduling and access 3) operations around delivering care ie; scheduling tests and those kinds of things moving patients through the system and then actually using digital tools and artificial intelligence to provide care – like reading pathologies and differential diagnoses and care pathways. By looking at digital solutions in those four buckets, I think we can address some of the workforce challenges.
Something we’ve done at Downstate to free-up time for some of our workforce is that instead of having 10-12 nursing assistants to do 1:1 patient observation (because they were getting out of bed or needed extra assistance) we changed that to a telehealth solution with remote monitoring, thereby freeing up at least 10 nursing assistants per shift per day.
Really trying to think through how digital health help us provide care both in the hospital and outside the hospital and help providers so they can avoid doing data entry and non-value-added work.
One of the buckets I mentioned earlier was the direct provision of care. One of the challenges we face now is helping patients to navigate complex clear pathway and develop those pathways.
Digital health and digital health solutions can help navigate those care pathways directly for patients in the hospital and at home. It can also plot out what those care pathways need to look like.
If you look at what’s happening with physical therapy, it has moved really to a digital remote activity and that’s usually using not just telehealth, but also using tools that can monitor a range of motion and really look at the efficacy of physical therapy.
We have a huge shortage of behavioral health providers and we are developing a number of digital tools that can provide teletherapy, but also tools that help with patients mental health.
There are many VR companies I’ve seen that have different tools that can address depression, anxiety, etc.. So I think there’s a huge opportunity in treatment and not just alleviating providers from doing mundane tasks.
Q: What is your five year plan?
A. So I think my five year plan is to make sure that digital health is part of the everyday delivery of care and that within five years we’re able to provide a seamless, simple care experience to every patient within our healthcare system.
So I also spend a lot of time advising early-stage digital health companies, which I really enjoy because I think it’s a challenge to sell into the provider space. The other thing I’ve done recently is I have created a framework for how to evaluate digital health companies, which is also relevant to startups.
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